Recent reviews by Aezu

To make it brief, when you look at this game you are getting exactly what it says on the box- there are a few side gimmicks and fun things to play around with but what you're doing by minute 10 you will also be doing by hour 5. With that aside, I would describe this game as a very chill and friendly chatroom with a fishing minigame and lots of barking in the background. Honestly, for how cheap it is I think it is well worth it just for that. It has bought back a lot of memories of how I used to "play" MMOs back in the day where 90% of the time I was just goofing around towns talking and messing around with people. I don't know how to explain the why but the experience you get and interactions are something you just really can't get by joining a random Discord server or chatroom with strangers- whether that comes from seeing people move around and doing something or just the nature that there is a $7.50 barrier just to even participate but I find it much more enjoyable in comparison.

Might be my new favourite game to just have up in the background while trying to do work or relaxing. I would recommend it if you have any interest in making some new friends and also having a solid never-ending and stress free better than Stardew Valley fishing minigame to grind for hours.

After playing this game to completion alongside the Mafia: Definitive Edition, I can thoroughly say that you'd be wasting both money and disc space by purchasing this version of the game over the original Mafia II. The performance is probably worse than the original with the controls feeling exactly as they did in 2010, which isn't for the better. What you're paying for in essence is 35GB of enhanced textures, which at least playing on a 1080p monitor on the highest settings, I barely found noticeable for how much disc space is being demanded.

I think the story and characters of Mafia II are compelling for the time that it came out, and definitely worth experiencing just once. They manage to make horrible human beings by all moral accounts still likeable in personality, leaving you both disgusted by the people that you do come to care for in the narrative. However the DE has also no changes to the story, you will not be experiencing any new or remade content- which I think is the only thing that would've saved this game for me as a stand-alone product.

I would say buy the original Mafia II but unfortunately as per usual from publishers nowadays, they make it impossible to buy the original games in favour of forcing the new versions onto consumers. Even on GOG you can only buy the classic version of Mafia I which the Definitive Edition has for all intents and purposes become a far better version of in every way. So I suggest either obtaining the game through 'other' means or watching a playthrough on Youtube for the full experience of Mafia II nowadays. It is not worth paying anything above $10-$15 for the original game, let alone pay full price of the DE to experience a game that still belongs in 2010 in this form.

Although I'm usually very hesitant about buying into any early access product, I can safely say that for what the asking price of Vampire Survivors is you are practically guaranteed to get your enjoyment's worth from the game.

It has an extremely basic premise and basic controls that make the game easy to pick up and play for anyone, its a simple top down shooter with rougelike mechanics. All weapons fire on a set timer without player input and besides a couple exceptions you don't have control over where they fire so all you have to concentrate on is your movement and spacing from the enemies. All rounds in it's current state only last to exactly 30 minutes at most giving it an extremely lax time commitment to play between activities. Combined this makes a mostly relaxing arcade experience with some pre-programmed spikes in difficult of the oncoming waves to drive up tension during certain points throughout the game.

The art style is near 1:1 with classic Castlevania games, with the same weapons you'll recognise from the series translated to the arcade gameplay. Alongside it is some fantastic music (at least I remember so, after about 14 hours listening to the same OST I had to disable it). Enemy designs aren't anything special to comment on, models are reused constantly as minibosses and elite units with a small handful of unique boss models.

The only thing the game is lacking in as of yet, which is difficult to solve due to its design is how noob-trappy and underperforming defensive/utility items are. This game is entirely catered to having a good offence to act as the best defence, there is no reason to waste slots on things like damage reduction/health/health per second when putting all those levels into a stronger weapon will keep you out of the dangerous situations those items would be useful in 99% of the time. It's even more confusing that some crutch items designed to help new players are locked behind achievements that would require a player to already be quite good at the game already to no longer need things like revives. Things like +8% more exp sounds too good to pass up on paper when you first start out, however doing more damage means more kills and more exp than you'd ever get for that wasted utility slot. The game is balanced to assume you won't have any defensive upgrades so there is a high tolerance for small mistakes that don't change until you unlock curses (ramping up difficulty modifier) meaning their inclusion is just to annoy the player by offering them useless upgrades that take up minimal inventory slots.

The game is updated weekly at the moment but if it were released as a final product as it stands today, I'd buy it immediately. All in all if a bit of a balancing complaint is the only problem I have with a $3 roguelike arcade shooter and still expect to get 30 hours of entertainment out of it, I can only say it's completely worth the asking price and an excellent product for it's budget. A great addition to any library as a way to pass the time.